Australian Cloud Vendor OrionVM Inks Partnership With San Francisco-Based BizCloud

OrionVM, an Australian cloud vendor that entered the U.S. market a couple of months ago, on Friday unveiled a major partnership with BizCloud, a San Francisco-based cloud solution provider.

OrionVM has the fastest distributed storage system on the market, and can deliver industry leading price and performance, Daniel Pfeiffer, OrionVM’s VP of marketing and partnerships, told CRN.

“Momentum is building. We are out to market and getting partners,” Pfeiffer said. “We see ourselves as enabling these guys to compete against bigger name vendors like Amazon and VMware.”

OrionVM claims its technology has enabled a breakthrough in the performance of virtual machines, one complimented by a sales philosophy tuned to benefit potential channel partners.

“We fundamentally architected our platform in a more efficient way. We’re a sustainable solution, we know we can provide this performance and still be able to maintain our business,” Pfeiffer said.

OrionVM has also won support from Gordon Bell, a tech luminary and Microsoft researcher who endorsed the approach to building cloud infrastructure, Pfeiffer said.

OrionVM CEO Sheng Yeo told CRN his company’s cloud has achieved benchmarks in disk and web server performance that are far superior to AWS and other public cloud retailers. Yeo said the breakthrough came through modeling the architecture on supercomputers.

BizCloud CEO Vahid Razavi told CRN that from what he has seen so far as a partner, those claims have proven accurate. The company’s intellectual property allows it to truly excel in storage and orchestration capabilities, he said.

OrionVM has delivered tangible performance upgrades, and has allowed his company to profit with larger margins, Razavi said.

“Over the years of supporting various enterprise clients we have come to the conclusion that all clouds are not created equal,” Razavi said.

“I see so many providers in this marketplace. They all have claims as far as performance and cost savings. At end of the day, we have to decide what we want to sell and market to our clients. The cost benefits are there with OrionVM and we don’t see that elsewhere,” Razavi told CRN.

It was the substantial reseller margins, as well as OrionVM’s commitment to being a pure channel company that motivated BizCloud to enter the partnership, Razavi said.

Razavi said the affordability doesn’t come at the cost of hosting in second-tier data centers. OrionVM infrastructure is maintained by Equinix and other top-flight facilities, he said.

It remains to be seen if more solution providers like BizCloud will be swayed by those claims, and help OrionVM build its North American business.

For his part, Razavi is so emboldened by the technology that he has announced what he calls “an IT intervention plan” aimed at disrupting businesses that use OrionVM’s competitors by trying to convince them they can get greater performance for their buck.

“We want to go in and talk to companies that use AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, Savvis. We think we can go and disrupt these businesses,” Razavi told CRN.

“They’ve taken the time to build it before putting it out to market,” Razavi said of his cloud partner. “And we’re leveraging all those capabilities. And taking away customers from the big boys.”

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.